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But admiration for the man must not be permitted to obscure the real issue; and the significant fact lies, not in the gallantry with which Metcalfe faced the storm, but rather in the inability, not merely of Stanley, but even of Peel, and his second secretary of state for the Colonies, William Ewart Gladstone, to read the signs of the times. When Canadian reformers suspected the whole episode as a move of Stanley’s to wreck Canadian self-government, they had this at least on their side, that the last great administration of Peel had no intention of granting what Baldwin and La Fontaine desired so passionately. It is easy to establish the point; for at every critical point in Metcalfe’s struggle he was met by the strongest approval from the Colonial Office. In May 1844, not only was his conduct approved, but the British government was ‘prepared to give him any support which is constitutionally within their power, in maintaining the authority of the Queen, and of Her Representative against unreasonable and exorbitant pretensions.’ In December of the same year he received the honour of a barony of the United Kingdom for his ‘zeal, ability and prudence.’ And when, a year later, he was granted release from his painful duties, the queen expressly commanded Stanley to express her entire approval of the ‘ability and prudence with which Lord Metcalfe had conducted the affairs of a very difficult government.’

Incidentally, the secretary of state for the Colonies found occasion to reaffirm his opinions on colonial government. Like Sydenham, Gladstone was not prepared to regard Canadian opinion as anything better than an approximate guide to the selection of colonial ministries; their rough energies required a certain amount of judicious leading; and their parties were not, as in Great Britain, recognized constitutional expedients, but factions, making, in so far as they did anything, towards separation from the mother country. Like Metcalfe, Gladstone drifted, without realizing that he was doing what he reprobated in the colonists, into accepting a party, and a small party, as the privileged exponents of loyal doctrine. ‘You will not fail to impress on your Council,’ he wrote confidentially to Metcalfe, ‘... the extreme risk which would attend any disruption of the present conservative party of Canada. Their own steadiness and your firmness and discretion, have gone far towards consolidating them as a party, and securing a stable administration of the Colony,’ In the same dispatch he encouraged Metcalfe to anticipate government carried on in the teeth of popular opinion, arguing that this had been done in England, and that, in any case, the bonds which united public men in Canada were much more feeble than at home. It would be difficult to find in shorter compass an exposition of the principles which threatened the young existence of the British Empire.

But it was not only the party of correct and educated conservatism in Britain which assumed this attitude. Stanley was followed, at the very end of 1845, by Gladstone, as secretary of state for the Colonies. At this date Gladstone had completely surrendered to the commercial doctrines of Cobden, and it is possible to see most of his later practical theories incipient in his actions of 1846. He has no doubt, for example, that the development of railways in Canada must depend, not on British governmental support, but ‘on private enterprise and capital.’ He is equally convinced of the virtues of laisser-faire doctrines in trade matters, advocating for Canada the nearest approach ‘to perfect freedom that the disposition of its inhabitants, and the exigencies of the public revenue there may permit.’ But in matters of government Gladstone stood practically where his late colleague had stood. In a verbose but admirable dispatch to Cathcart he defined a position precisely similar to that held by Stanley and Metcalfe. He was, perhaps, a little further ahead when he declared that ‘the deliberate sense of the Canadian community at large, to which electoral, and therefore also legislative functions, had been entrusted, must determine the form of Canadian laws and institutions.’ But when the occasion for action came, the governor-general was to avoid identifying the crown with any colonial party; he was to ‘act with great aloofness from local influence in all appointments’; in short, he was to be the self-limited tyrant of an immature democracy, and he must not anticipate by one hour the date when democracy would come of age. To conclude, he was to see in Metcalfe one whose administration, ‘under the peculiar circumstances of the task he had to perform, may justly be regarded as a model for his successor.’

It is difficult in these matters to avoid judging times past, but not dissimilar to our own, by standards which have been accepted in the interval. Under the shadow of accomplished facts the modern critic forgets all modifying circumstances in the past. Canada had barely achieved an entrance into civilization, and British statesmen might be pardoned as they looked doubtfully across three thousand miles to a land of rough farms and wild forest, peopled at best by half-pay officers and adventuresome agricultural aristocrats; at worst by turbulent Irish savages and paupers, incompetent to guide their own, apart altogether from national affairs. It is difficult sometimes to have faith even in civilized democracy; why should we quarrel with men who distrusted it in the earliest making? Reports from trusted representatives had told of crude and hurried legislation; recent rebellion had proved that Canadians had not yet learned the subtleties of peaceful agitation; and the very loyalists who crossed the Atlantic to apply in person for some small recompense for loyalty, hardly recommended their land as one of enlightened political altruism. There were rumours, too, of separationist agitation. French Canada lay there as a political terra incognita within whose limits another republican outburst might at any time occur. Across the border was a great semi-hostile state, and England might be pardoned for doubts when a governor-general’s dispatch could report a toast, as disloyal as it was ungrammatical, to ‘British Constitutional Liberty if possible ... and in the event of the British government losing sight of us, we will become the adopted sons of Uncle Sam.’ There was no precedent, except that of the New England colonies, for concessions such as the colonial reformers claimed, and the price of New England liberty had been the Declaration of Independence. It was a dark outlook, but the building of an empire, like other vast speculations, has risks attendant on it, at least equivalent to its advantages; and neither Metcalfe nor his fellow-governors in Britain had yet learned the imperial lesson of audacious faith.